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I’m sure your ears are still bleeding from the previous week’s retro metal podcast so I decided to take it easy on you this week. It’s time we look at some roots. Look underneath and you will find some of the most heartfelt, original material to come into the folk/americana realm in quite some time. Enjoy!

• Capsized – Richmond Fontaine (Thirteen Cities)
• Moorsetown – Sun Kil Moon (April)
• Slowness – Calexico (Carried To Dust)
• Exploded View – Death Vessel (Nothing is Precious)
• The Captain and Hourglass – Laura Marling (Alas I Cannot Swim)
• Rooks – Shearwater (Rook)
• A Book Like This – Angus and Julia Stone (A Book Like This)
• Kingdom of Ice – Wovenhand (Ten Stones)

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RELEASE DAY

Easy Star All-Stars – Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band CD
Price: $12.00

The new Easy Star All-Stars album, EASY STAR’S LONELY HEARTS DUB BAND, comes out today. You’ve already heard us go on about what a great record this is, so we’ll let some other folks praise the record for a moment:

The early buzz has been pretty incredible, with coverage in tons of major publications from the UK to Australia to Holland to the US. Help us out by buying the record this week, through our webstore or at any retail location, physical or digital. First week sales are very important! If you like the record, please write reviews on iTunes or Amazon. Each of these steps helps in spreading the word and keeping the buzz on the album growing. We also have put a new poster into the store, along with a 4″ circular bumper sticker. If you order now through the webstore, or any time until May 14, you can get a free sticker with an order of $9 or more.

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Time to bring back an old forums favorite. The Band/Song name game is fairly simple. Below on the comments space, I will post the first Artist/Song title. Simply use the last letter of the song title for the next artist.

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Canada’s Great Lake Swimmers have been getting a lot of hype over their new album, Lost Channels, just out on Nettwerk records. They just completed a video for their first single Pulling On A Line. It’s an easy going song and a gentle way into the Easter Long Weekend. Have a good one.

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Welcome students old and new…every Thursday until the sun blazes the Earth, the staff shall pay homage to the most classic indie albums of all time. No countdowns, or top 100 lists, just a weekly gaze into the Music Emissions vault. Let the education begin…

Violent Femmes, originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin has been signing their own unique branding of Folk Rock with flare for nearly 30 years. And while their spotlight in the sun was a song called “Blister In The Sun”, they have always patted down the alternative rock scene. Songs like “Kiss Off”, and “Gone, Daddy Gone” which was later covered by Gnarls Barkley always shined brighter in the Indie scene than they could ever in the mainstream. *See their cover of “Crazy” – Gnarls Barkley for further evidence of such shine. Left for dead after the 80′s, VF was seemingly kindling to a new generation of listeners when “Color Me Once” appeared on the Cinematic splash soundtrack for “The Crow”.

Arguably their best record, and one of the best indie music album’s in history is the self-titled “Violent Femmes”. Here’s Dan Kramer’s review from April 0f 2003. Read more

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You’re bound to find a whole dumpster full of blog posts and articles today marking the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain. Within those pages and pages of paragraphs you’ll find everything from genuine sorrow to half-hearted memorials of an event, rather than a person. My own sentiments lay somewhere in the middle.

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Spinnerette has set June 2 as the release date for their much-anticipated debut album. The self-titled SPINNERETTE album will be released on Anthem/Universal Music Canada (UMC), the country’s leading music company, and includes thirteen new songs written by Brody Dalle and produced by Alain Johannes. This is the first Brody Dalle helmed full-length release since The Distillers’ 2003 Coral Fang album. Read more

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The Psychic Paramount: America’s greatest current rock band, no questions asked. More than so many flake-out noise combos or whatever, these guys seriously go for it with their playing, pushing themselves into new, unprecedented worlds of heaviness. Not like heavier than everything before, but certainly heavy in a new way. I dig on Times New Viking and some of the other neu-no-fi rockers that are running around the nation today, but PP manage to sound blown out and perfect and hi fi and overwhelming in a way that no bedroom rocker could dream of. Hmm now that I think of it, this is exactly what Black Flag’s “Process of Weeding Out” would be if it was seriously impeccable instead of awesomely questionable.

Marion Brown “Sweet Earth Flying”: I cannot get enough of this fucking record. The best of fusion’s polytonal, Rhodes-heavy expansiveness is perfectly cut with some truly free post-fire music out-jazz. Brown was such a sick melodic player… a cool follow up to the promise of Ornette Coleman’s proto weirdness. And the piano solo is so beautiful, definitely the best Debussy-vibin’ I’ve heard this side of Monk’s catalogue.

The Bug “London Zoo”: This gets heavy play in the van, duh. “Pressure” was my shit, but this is so much thicker and more intense. Some people declared it boring, but I think they just missed the emotional complexity and creeping dread that runs through the whole album. There’s a lot to unpack here, and some sick bass to boot. Serious.

Notorious B.I.G. “Ten Crack Commandments”: I mean, this is so obvious but fuck it. There are few things as nice as finishing a show with some serious rap music, and this one is a true top contender. Funny as fuck, especially when he makes fun of you for thinking you can employ a functioning credit system with crackheads. Psht forget it, indeed.

Thank You: We are touring with them, and they are great. The This Heat reference gets thrown around a lot when talking about this band, and I can see it in a sense. Well, pretty much just for that track “Horizontal Hold,” like if you took that and ran with it, adding whatever the fuck you felt/feel like along the way. Few bands today are going with sound fundamentals as hard as these guys are; churning and explosive, totally beautiful.

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Long before Steve Jobs decided DRM free music really did make sense, Amazon was offering up unrestricted MP3′s for the same price that iTunes was selling their caged versions. Apple finally saw the light and eventually lifted the restrictions, demolishing the only downside to making the iTunes store your primary digital music source. Today, Apple decided they liked handicapping themselves after all and announced their new pricing structure. It looks a little something like this:

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Damn, I’m feeling old with this week’s podcast. I’ve been meaning to do a podcast with all of the new “elder” bands that have released metal albums in the past year. Well, here it is. Some of the finest batch of new songs from bands who have been around a lot longer than you have.

• Conquest – Judas Priest (Nostradamus)
• More Than Meets The Eye – Testament (The Formation Of Damnation)
• Meet Your Maker – Metal Church (This Present Wasteland)
• English Rose – Motörhead (Motorizer)
• To Mother Earth – Gamma Ray (Land Of The Free II)
• Kicked – Annihilator (Metal)

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